Les Cousins

Heather Wood obituary

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Singer with the 1960s folk group the Young Tradition, whose songs ranged from sea shanties to haunting treatments of traditional music

Heather Wood, who has died aged 79, was the last surviving member of the Young Tradition, heroes of the 1960s folk scene in the UK and North America with their rousing three-part unaccompanied harmonies, clothes that made them look like rock stars and songs that ranged from sea shanties to a haunting treatment of the Lyke Wake Dirge.

The Young Tradition was the name of one of many London folk clubs in the mid-60s, and it was held in a pub then known as the Scots Hoose, near Cambridge Circus in the West End. Peter Bellamy and Royston Wood were two regular singers there, and Heather “just joined in from the audience” in 1965. The three of them found that “people would pay us to sing”, and were managed for a while by Bruce Dunnet, who ran the club and suggested they took its name. Later they became regulars at the Les Cousins club in nearby Greek Street, where they sang alongside Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, who lived above them in Somali Road, West Hampstead.

Signed to Transatlantic, in 1966 they released their first album, The Young Tradition, which included the Lyke Wake Dirge, the story of a departed soul making a hazardous journey to purgatory, as well as their gutsy treatment of the Tyneside colliers’ song Byker Hill. It immediately established their reputation.

Unlike the other great young unaccompanied vocal group of the era, the Watersons, the Young Tradition were not from the same family and were three very different individuals with different styles who “made up our own harmonies”. Bellamy loved the blues, Royston had roots in classical music, while Heather said she was influenced by “the Everly Brothers and years of school and church choirs”. What they had in common was their love of folk music, and a commitment to meeting and learning from veteran traditional singers such as Harry Cox or the Copper family.

Their second album, So Cheerfully Round, was released in 1967, the same year they were invited to the Newport folk festival in the US, where Heather remembered them singing informally with Janis Joplin. In the same year they recorded an EP of sea shanties, Chicken on a Raft, which was released in 1968, while their final studio album, Galleries, which came out in 1969, included guest appearances from David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London, Dave Swarbrick and Dolly Collins.

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Review: “Les Cousins” – The Soundtrack Of Soho’s Legendary Folk & Blues Club

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By Dave Thompson

Les Cousins: The Soundtrack Of Soho’s Legendary Folk & Blues Club

Cherry Red (3-CD set)

Talk about the British folk scene of the 1960s and, sooner rather than later, the name Les Cousins will come up — no, not another of the unheard legends that bestrode that era like an arran-sweatered colossus (although there were plenty of those around at the time), but the venue wherein said colossi strutted their stuff.

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An unprepossessing Greek Street restaurant, where the young Al Stewart shepherded the evening’s acts on and off the stage; where Sandy Denny and Paul Simon were as likely to appear as a toothless Irishman singing “Danny Boy”; where both the folk boom of the mid-1960s, and the variants that followed in its footsteps were born.

Les Cousins Club Continental opened in October 1964, in a space that once had held the Skiffle Cellar. A failure in that form, it reopened, sans the last two words, in April 1965, with a solid diet of folk music, and remained in action for the next seven years. During which time, more or less every British (and many American) folk artist of note either played there, or at least stopped by.

This box set — amazingly, the first to truly focus upon Les Cousins alone, as opposed to the overall scene of the day — merely scratches the surface of the club’s renown. Three discs of (many of) the venue’s best known guests could probably be followed by 30 stuffed with lesser known talents, and 300 of complete unknowns. If only anyone had recorded their performances…

Unfortunately, if there are any unknown live-at-Les Cousins tapes circulating… well, they’re still unknown. The 71 tracks spread across three discs here are universally taken from studio albums, although so many of them are hard (if not impossible) to find these days that that is nothing to sniff at.

Neither is the roll call of talents. Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny, Al Stewart, the Young Tradition, the Incredible String Band, Donovan, Julie Felix, Wizz Jones, the Third Ear Band, Plainsong, Bridget St John… Anne Briggs, who is due for the super deluxe treatment later this year, shares space with the immortal Nadia Cattouse; Hamish Imlach with Mudge & Clutterbuck; Paul Simon with Shirley Collins. And while the song selection is not as adventurous as some browsers might demand, it is certainly representative of the artists involved.

Of course, for a true impression of what a night at Les Cousins might have sounded like, the BBC would need to uncork the long mothballed London Folk Club Cellar tapes, the corporation’s own approximation of a venue such as this in the mid-late 1960s. A taste of that is, in fact, on tap in a forthcoming Martin Carthy BBC sessions box set, and we can only hope that more is in the pipeline, while anyone who actually remembers the show is still around to appreciate it.

In the meantime, however, let Les Cousins be your guide to a unique period in British folk, and the unique venue that catered for its admirers.

 

Dave Thompson is a contributing editor at Goldmine, contributing the Spin Cycle vinyl and reissues column and more besides. A much published author, his latest book An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock was released in July 2023. He has co-written autobiographies by Eddie and Brian Holland, New York Doll Sylvain Sylvain and Walter Lure of Johnny Thunder’s Heartbreakers. His memoir The Grunge Diaries is in the Goldmine Store.

Les Cousins Music club was the centre of the universe for British ‘contemporary’ folk and blues

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Les Cousins Music club. The centre of the universe for British ‘contemporary’ folk, blues and beyond was a cellar at 49 Greek Street, Soho. By Ian Anderson.

Les Cousins membership card, 1967.

Be careful with bestowing time-sensitive names on emerging movements. Art Nouveau which flourished at the beginning of the last century is now Art Very Vieux. Modern Jazz of the 1950s is now antique, and the New Wave of the late ’70s has long since crashed on the beach. And so it was with the sounds christened Contemporary Folk in the 1960s, now irrevocably tied to nostalgia for that golden age of post-war youth culture of half a century ago. But it had an extraordinary blossoming in its day, and the hothouse and nursery for it all was a basement club at 49 Greek Street in London’s Soho.

On a grey day earlier this summer I rang on the doorbell of a flat in Frith Street and entered a hospitable folk Tardis, spinning back nearly five decades at the invitation of Diana Matheou, wife of the late Andy Matheou (or Matthews, as many knew him), whose parents Loukas and Margaret owned the restaurant below which the club was housed.

But first, a bit of pre-history. Veteran skiffler Ron Gould recalls the years BC (Before Cousins) when the venue housed the Skiffle Cellar. “As far as I remember the Skiffle Cellar was founded by Russell Quaye and Hylda Syms in 1956. The Skiffle Cellar was one of many rival skiffle venues in the area at the time. The most thriving was John Hasted’s club in Gerrard Street; if you went to one you were unlikely to go to the other or The 2i’s. It looked very much like a cave, as did most Soho cellars. After Bruce Turner left Humphrey Lyttleton and formed his own Jump Band, John Jack became their manager and took over the Cellar on Friday and Saturday nights in 1957 for all-nighters, with Bruce Turner’s Jump Band as the headliners.”

Diana picks up the chronology. It seems that in 1959, Loukas Matheou acquired the lease for the ground floor and basement of 49, Greek Street, putting a kitchen in the back of the basement and turning the remainder of both floors into The Soho Grill, a restaurant specialising in French cuisine. It proved larger than was necessary so after a few years he decided to use the other part of the basement for another purpose. French discotheques were taking off – La Poubelle, Le Kilt, and Le Disco­theque had all opened in Soho – so Loukas agreed with a public school customer called Phil (nobody seems to be able to remember his surname) to turn the unused part of the basement into Les Cousins, presumably named after the Claude Chabrol film.‘Les Cousins, Club Continental’ opened on Sunday 4th October 1964, was unlicensed, opened every night and had all-nighters with live bands. “However it didn’t really take off,” says Diana. “At some point there was a falling-out with Phil. Loukas told Andy to sit in each night to make sure everything was above board. Perhaps sensing a change was in the air, Phil asked Noel Murphy along to compère an all-nighter and musicians told each other there was a place to play – much like Chinese whispers. I do know that Phil was dismissed and that Andy was already listening to Dylan and was totally disinterested in running a discotheque. I’m sure these and many other factors all came together – the time, place and people were right and Les Cousins the iconic folk and blues club was born.”

Skiffle Cellar flier circa 1957.

The rebirth opening date that is often quoted is 16th April 1965. Early memories and pictures have it with sports car photos on the wall, plus a wagon wheel and fishing nets to make the disco a bit folkier.

Al Stewart, who at that time had a residency at Bunjies on the fringes of Covent Garden, remembered those early days in his interview in fR367/8. “I was talking to Noel Murphy and he said there was a brand new folk club just opened up a couple of blocks away which turned out to be Les Cousins. So Murphy said ‘Do you want to go over and check it out?’, so I said ‘fine’. I went over with Noel, I went down the stairs – there were maybe twelve people down there and they were all crowded round one guy playing the guitar, and that of course was Bert Jansch …”

“So I’d work at Bunjies and then I’d go over and hang out at Cousins and watch the people. I think it did all-nighters very quickly which is actually where I got my first gig, because Phil – who used to run it before Andy – by about three o’clock in the morning he’d basically had it and wanted to go home, so what he was looking for was someone who’d basically put people on and off. I got the gig as the compère of the Cousins which I had for a couple of years. It was my job to put people on and take them off which meant that round about 4 o’clock in the morning when everyone was asleep I could get up and start doing my own songs!”

The venue took off very quickly. Not only did it have an adventurous booking policy and a growing in-crowd, but it also had those all-nighters on the weekends.

For impecunious youths like myself, hitch-hiking up to London to see all these amazing artists who were being advertised in the Melody Maker Folk Forum each week and enjoying growing fame nationwide, it wasn’t only a musical honeypot but the cheapest hotel in London. And once you’d become accepted as a performer, you even got in for free.

Diana has Andy’s pocket diaries and address book for the Cousins years and they make mind-boggling reading for people familiar with the burgeoning folk scene of the day. Not daring to ask if these valuable artefacts could be borrowed, I read some of the entries into my recorder. Apologies for imminent anorak list overdose and excited squeaks …“April 1966: Al Stewart £3. Diz Disley half the door. Trevor Lucas £8. Davy Graham £15. Long John Baldry £15 for the all-nighter. Sandy Denny, John Foreman… Spider John Koerner £25! (I was probably there for that, 10th April 1966)… Mox & John Lemont. Tuesday 26th, Van Morrison £3. Wednesday 27th, Jo Ann Kelly £6. Malcolm Price, Gerry Lockran, Sandy Bull (the American equivalent to Davy Graham), Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny… what a week!”

“June 1967. Friday, Tom Rush; Diz Disley for the all-nighter. Saturday, John Renbourn; Long John Baldry for the all-nighter. We go through to the following week… Friday 9th June, Sandy Denny in the evening, Cliff Aungier doing the all-nighter. Saturday 10th, Bert Jansch; all-nighter Noel Murphy and Wizz Jones. Friday 16th, Indian music.

Saturday 17th, Alex Campbell in the evening, Davy Graham on the all-nighter. Friday 23rd, Roy Harper evening, Al Stewart all-nighter. Saturday 24th, Young Tradition evening, Alexis Korner the all-nighter. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

In 1967, Loukas decided to change the restaurant from French cuisine to Greek and renamed it Dionysus. Downstairs the wagon wheel went, the space was enlarged, the stage put in the centre, the old sofas and chairs replaced by church pews, and a friend of Andy’s came in to paint the walls with squirls and whirls inspired by acid trips. The Cousins (as most people knew it by then, not knowing who this bloke called Les was!) entered its golden years. It also, unlike most small clubs of the day, had a microphone plugged into a fairly decent hi-fi amplifier that fed the house speakers behind the stage.
I have a theory that the Cousins mic was single-handedly responsible for the performing posture of most of the 1960s singer/ songwriter/ guitarist legends. Look at photos of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Al Stewart or John Martyn from those days, and they’re likely to be hunched on a stool over their instruments, bringing mouth and sound hole as close as possible together. This was before the advent of pick-ups in acoustic guitars – the early Barcus Berry transducers didn’t become ubiquitous until the start of the next decade – so you needed to direct everything into that one microphone, as closely as possible. We all got rather adept at it.

In her book about the era, A Blues For Annie (available via Amazon, recommended!), Annie Matthews recalls arriving there around that time. “Al Stewart, who played at Bunjies, was finishing the night by going to Les Cousins. A crowd were going with him. So we walked the several blocks or so to Greek Street, and we came to a narrow doorway. It would have been easy to miss. There was a folded sign by the door that had the name of the performer written on it. A steep flight of stairs led down into darkness. At the bottom was a stout young man with a round face and short black hair. He was collecting money from people as they went in. I followed everyone in to yet another dark cellar. It was a very large one. There was a small stage with a piano behind it, and church pews for seats all around it. At one end of the room was a section that was behind a counter where a young man sold sodas, coffee, and sandwiches. He had an Oriental cast to his face and a Fu Manchu moustache. Jet black hair swung around his ears. He bounced around to the music as he served customers coffee. The club was thick with cigarette smoke. Everyone was smoking. I stayed there all night.”

Mike Cooper remembers that “the all-nighters on a Saturday were a trial by fire of stamina and patience both for audience and performers. Leaving there on Sunday morning we would stagger bleary-eyed into a Greek Street being hosed down and swept clean, ridding all trace of the previous night’s reveries, and going for what was sold as coffee in glass cups at the Pollo Bar (still there but don’t read the Trip Advisor reviews) around the corner at 20 Old Compton Street.

John Martyn & Andy Matheou. Photo: Ray Stevenson.

“But when you played Les Cousins you had joined ‘the scene’; been acknowledged, made it, whatever that meant at the time. It was the Vatican and Mecca and Jerusalem of the folk scene.”

“Iwandered outside in the interval of one session to roll another roll-up and Andy who ran the place was talking to a short, curly-haired guy in a brown suede jacket, who looked remarkably like Tim Buckley. So much so that I told him. He replied, with a smile, ‘I am Tim Buckley’ – to which I replied ‘Yes and I’m Tim Hardin.’ It was Tim Buckley, I later discovered, and lost the opportunity to tell him how much I admired his music and I still do. David Bowie turned up once as well and wanted to play but the guest list was full for that evening. Sorry David.”

You never knew who would turn up to play on an all-nighter. The singer-songwriter introduced as Steve Adams, who grew up to be Cat Stevens. A short American who Noel Murphy would stick on at 4am to try out some remarkable song he’d just written was called Paul Simon. A wonderful set from another American who’d come across to experience Cambridge Folk Festival but we already had his records: Eric Andersen. A really nervous, undistinguished singer-songwriter called Nick Drake who sent the audience to sleep. I have fond memories of a night when Spider John Koerner put Al Jones and myself on for a small-hours floor spot and Davy Graham got up and played bongos with us, and of Ron Geesin disembowelling the piano, passing bits of it out into the pews while playing, searching for an elusive sound. And of transporting music from the Third Ear Band …

Andy Matheou’s booking methods were delightfully ramshackle. Once he liked and trusted a performer, they’d be booked every few weeks. I remember when I was living in London over the blues boom winter of ‘68 / ’69 I’d get the tube in from Notting Hill every Wednesday lunch­time to get a Melody Maker at the news stand at Tottenham Court Road tube station, hot off the press.

Loukas Matheou

That was how you found out if you’d got a gig at the Cousins that coming weekend! But you didn’t mind because not only was it a great gig, those listings were pored over by folk fans and organisers all over the country and if you were listed there, you’d – as Mike Cooper said – made it. It was a guaranteed career boost.

Back to the diary: “October 1968: Friday 4th Michael Chapman and Saturday 5th, Jackson C Frank and Ron Geesin. Saturday 12th Young Tradition, Mike Cooper and Peter Sarstedt. Thursday 17th October – Al Jones and Ian Anderson (beginning a residency! Yay! There you go!). Saturday 19th October Al Stewart, evening; John Martyn on the all-nighter – Al Stewart was up to £20 by then! Gordon Giltrap, Sally Oldfield, The Strawbs, Andy Fernbach…”

As well as becoming an accomplished young blues singer and harmonica player who later joined Panama Limited, recording for EMI Harvest, Annie Matthews also ended up working there. Again from her book: “There was an opportunity to work behind the bar. I talked it over with Mr Matheou. The other person who applied for the job was a homeless man nicknamed Divinity. When his wife had died he had some sort of mental breakdown and lost his home, and ever since then he had been going around the soup kitchens and shelters. He did not have a big interest in music but Cousins was open all night. Mr Matheou suggested that he get a real job, and offered to give him money to buy a suit, but he refused.”

“One of our acts at Cousins, Ralph McTell, had a huge hit [The Streets Of London] telling a young woman who was complaining about her life that homeless people had a tougher lot, and that she should be grateful for her life. I had this nasty feeling that I had inspired this song.”

Annie remembers some of the other characters associated with the place. “There were a number of accompanying musicians and street performers who played between the main sets. Some of these people performed for the theatre lines and then came to Les Cousins as a warm place to stay until the first buses and trains ran in the morning. One example was Don Partridge. He was a one-man band. He had a guitar, harmonica, bass drum, and a cymbal attached to him. He was regarded as a novelty act. However, in the years to come he released a single that went to the top of the British charts.”

“Some other street performers that associated with him found out about Les Cousins through him. ‘Old Meg’ sang Danny Boy in a high trembling warble. That seemed to be the only song that she knew. ‘Paris Nat’ Schaffer played the accordeon and sang. He wore a peaked cloth hat to cover his bald head. He had some comedy songs that he performed again and again.”

Diana Matheou (Soar, as she was then) had begun singing at Colchester Folk Club in the early 1960s. “I came to drama school in London when I was nineteen. Before that my brother was studying here and when I was seventeen I came up to go to a do at his college and he said ‘There’s an all-nighter down at Cousins. You could go and sing. We should go to that.’ Anyway, I went down and I didn’t know when I passed by this chubby, woolly-haired guy on the door that this was going to be the love of my life! We just went in. It was the old Cousins, Derroll Adams was playing, there were old sofas, just old chairs, it was packed out. And I sat on this sofa all night talking to Steve Adams, soon to become Cat Stevens. And we got on really well… I was starting to do a bit of songwriting myself, he was telling me all about how he was too.”

Signed by agent Julia Creasey to Roy Guest’s Folk Directions agency, Diana started going to the Cousins regularly and by 1969 she and Andy Matheou had become an item. “It was like being at the centre of the universe. After I became pregnant, I moved in here in 1970. We were running the club from here, and I’d push Em, our little baby, in the pram, put her in the corridor of the restaurant upstairs, go downstairs and run the club. I did the door for a couple or three years.”

“Some singers and musicians became close friends to Andy and me, in particular John Martyn. He and Andy had a bond and a recognition beyond the ordinary. It was that which John initially wrote about in May You Never. One summer day he bounded into the Frith Street flat with the DJ Jeff Dexter and told us, ‘I’ve written a song for you.’ He and Andy spent loads of time together. Bev and John had a flat in Denning Road. Bev got pregnant with her daughter about two months before me so we shared our pregnancy and I went over to Denning Road quite a lot. Nick Drake was there as well, and Bridget St John.”

“The Matheou family’s contribution is hardly ever mentioned as, understandably, it’s the music and radiancy of the time that people remember most. However the fact of the family’s nurturing was significant. The young man who Andy was had an honest, fearless nature, a capable, curious mind, a generous heart – like his parents – and loved music. The Matheou family were the right people in the right place.”

“Andy was quick to discern what was authentic and, not being materially driven, became part of the family of musicians and the ethos of the time. Many turned up at the family flat in Frith Street, were fed and sometimes housed there too. Jackson C Frank truly became part of the family while he was in London, referring to Loukas and Margaret as ‘like his parents’.”

“Anyone coming into the restaurant kitchen hungry didn’t stay that way for long. Loukas would listen to the hard luck stories, responding with wisdom, dry wit and food.”

As Diana recounts, Loukas and Margaret returned briefly to Cyprus but within a year came the Turkish invasion and they were forced to come back to Soho. Margaret was dying of cancer. Within eighteen months Loukas lost his home, his land and his loving wife. “Loukas then went to Barking in East London to help his brother, also made a refugee who’d lost everything, helped him with a kebab shop, and he said to Andy ‘Listen boy, you’ve got a daughter and you’re not earning any money, and I’m going to open a wet fish shop in Barking. You should come and do it with me.’ So he did. I gave up my teaching and I went and did it too. We did that for eighteen years. Still living here, we’d commute. But it was beautiful. So we went into that, and it was as far apart from what we’d done before as you can imagine. But it gave us a very broad life. And we kept close to some of those folk who we’d always been close to through the club. We always kept in touch with Bert and Roy.”

Sadly, Andy Matheou passed away in 2005 from a heart attack brought on by diabetes, leaving Diana the custodian of the Cousins history and many happy memories. But there’s one sour twist to the story. There’s now an organisation and record label calling itself Les Cousins and it even uses the old Cousins logo from its membership cards.

“Something called ‘Les Cousins Music’ can be found on the internet run by a man called Mark Pavey,” says Diana. “He had nothing whatsoever to do with the club and has used the name and provenance without permission. I need to let this be known to honour the Matheou family whose hard work and generosity were fundamental to the club’s existence. It’s a little like someone taking your music and putting their own name to it – much like Paul Simon did to Martin Carthy with Scarborough Fair all those years ago. This behaviour is in direct opposition to the ethos of the club.”

Really, Les Cousins deserves a book!

Source: Les Cousins Music Club, Soho — Al Stewart, Bert Jansch